A response to Anandawardhana - the self professed expert writes back!!!!

I have noted with some amusement the comments made with regard to the Sunday Times article by Anandawardhana in his post titled 'Ayeshea gets it wrong'. Specifically a section in which I had talked about the necessity/importance of knowing English with regards to blogging in Sri Lanka. I don't know how much of a difference this will make to anyone, but I was not referring to blogs worldwide and merely the importance of English in relation to the possibility of blogs becoming mainstream in Sri Lanka. I assure you that no disrespect was meant to anyone blogging in Sinhala and Tamil - kudos to you - but I was making reference to the fact that a knowledge of English is necessary to blog under the current situation. Therefore for a blogger to be born under CURRENT CIRCUMSTANCES IN SRI LANKA, English (like it or not) is a pre-requisite to begin blogging. And before you go up in smoke again, consider this:
Even NAVIGATING the web is still not possible in Sinhala. Is it? Take a look at your Kottu website - can someone with NO knowledge of English be able to get there and set up a blog? Similarly like it or not, even those blogging IN Sinhala have not been able to enjoy widespread readership because we do not possess a uniform Sinhala font. Therefore Anandawardhana, even YOUR site largely appears as a series of blocks on my office computer, while some other blogs written in Sinhala display themselves across my monitor as a string of question marks. Therefore it so stands that you and I would have to download the SAME Sinhala font for me to be able to read your posts - and as we both know, there are many fonts available.
What I was talking about was that given the CURRENT context - which is that navigating the net is not possible in Sinhala since we have no Sinhala browsers and that even writing in Sinhala does not ensure wide readership, knowledge of English is necessary (at least a basic one) to be able to begin to blog in Sri Lanka. For this same reason, blogging CANNOT become mainsteam until this situation changes. Tamil has a uniform font, but then I noticed that there were very few comments left in response to some of the posts on these blogs. But again, a majority of the people in this country cannot read Tamil (sad truth and possibly a root cause of the conflict but that's another post altogether). So it stands that the sad and harsh truth is that until the Internet in general is made available to the masses by breaking the language barrier, blogging will remain the domain of a few hundred people at most. And in a country of 18.5 million this is hardly mainstream.
Secondly, not that this is important, but I have never professed to be an "expert" on blogging - so I really don't know where this "self professed expert" tag is coming from. I just happened to have researched and written a thesis on blogging, based on which I have drawn some conclusions which may or may not be accepted and may or may not be correct. Last I heard, writing an UNDERGRAD thesis did not give anyone the right to consider the author an expert. And least of all the author.
And thirdly... I am not monolingual - I know my Sinhala very well thank you very much... (alhough I must confess that I know no Tamil which continues to worry me slightly to date - ideally I would be trilingual but I hope to rectify that soon)
Well that about wraps it up from my point of view - I hope this has cleared up some of the confusion/resentment that this article seems to have generated. And finally, purely objectively I thought the article was a good one - but then different strokes for different folks I guess.
Oh and I can put my thesis up for general mangling as soon as I get my results which are due today hopefully. Fingers crossed - and you may all have something to rip apart within the course of this week. :-)